The thrill of twins (a drama of expansion) || Anything you can do, I can do better. || An ode to preserves. || A project for the weekend. || Seattle public schools, you say. || The progressive retail experience, parts 408, 409 and 410. || Repair job, watched closely. || At last, lamps made from croissants and leftover bread. || Absurdle, adversarial Wordle. || One of these objects is not like the others. || Public-information billboards of note. || Being “anti-racist,” she doesn’t depict them. || Touchdown. || At last, lab-grown hair. || His and hers, a comparison. || Heh. || Cold sorcery. || It’s a consolation, I suppose. || Fondling scenes. || Insert finger, please. || And finally, remember, your cat is trying to kill you.

Granted, hanging up spoons in straight rows isn’t quite as impressive as the oeuvre of Rembrandt. But if we pretend hard enough, maybe it will seem as if it were?

Steve Sailer spies some farcically woke art-exhibition notes. 

Photographs of which can be found here. This one in particular is quite a feat. 

Update:

In the comments, Joan adds, “They want to spoil everything.” Indeed, the tone of the exhibition notes is reliably sour and anhedonic. Only the contrivance is amusing, albeit unwittingly. And it occurs to me that it would save a lot of time and rhetorical straining to simply stamp each artwork with the words “BAD WHITEY.” The effect would be much the same and with little loss of meaningful content. It’s also worth pondering the term “white degeneracy,” and whether any other racial demographic would be subject to similar usage in the official display notes of a mainstream art exhibition.

Update 2:

It seems to me that juxtaposing Rembrandt’s paintings with half-arsed tat by the ungifted-but-heroically-brown – an unremarkable frame, some spoons in rows – is not a great way to establish the implied artistic parity. But in order to be woke and right-thinking, we must somehow will the equivalence into being. Or at least pretend.

And this is why wokeness is corrupting. It eats away at realism, and at honesty.

Also, open thread. 

This just in. Clown-self pronouns:

In this situation, I would make sure that I exclusively use clown pronouns to talk about Cypress, so Cypress knows that I see clownself for who clown is.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

If you would like Maybe Burke, above, to provide “personal growth trainings” – say, regarding how you may speak when transgender people both are and aren’t present – by all means, knock yourself out.

Apparently, we non-transgender people, almost the entire human race, are supposed to embrace the prefix cis and use it continually, habitually, in order to suggest that being transgender is in no way atypical, niche, or anomalous. And to erase distinctions between, say, actual women and trans women, i.e., men with mental health problems. And this is said by someone bedevilled by urges to control what others may say, even in private, and even to control what they may think. Which itself is rather noteworthy. One might say anomalous.*

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. *Added via the comments. 

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders. || Well, it must’ve rattled loose. || At last, a robotic bartender. || Bird feeder. || I bring you art. || Babe detected. || His back-yard view is better than yours. || You can’t go far wrong with accelerated penguins. || In fairness, it was his first attempt. || Just wind and frozen sand. || Phantom nipples. || Near miss detected. || Now you do it. I’ll start the clock. || Incoming. || Satisfied customer. || Strange dog. || Dentist’s magic hat. || When the day just keeps getting worse. || You want one and you know it. || He has a theory, ladies. || The tardigrade’s toes (and tiny things digesting other tiny things). || And finally, for the sleepy kiddies, there are goblins lurking under the bed.

Oh, and a reminder that I now have a Gettr account. 

Lifted from the comments, a technological feat:

Traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino motorists.

Readers are invited to spot the word that’s doing the heavy lifting. It appears 1o times in the article quoted above, excluding variations.

The red-light and speed cameras are, we’re told, “distributed roughly evenly among the city’s Black, Latino and white neighbourhoods.” Despite which, “the ticketing rate for households in majority-Black ZIP codes” is “more than three times that of households in majority-white areas.” And so, explanations are searched out, including the width of a given road, the effect of passing vacant lots, and the geographical distribution of grocery stores. “Structural racism” is of course invoked, a phenomenon that apparently includes ticketing cyclists who choose to ride on the pavement, illegally.

Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.

See also the words disparate, disparity and disparities, which occur no fewer than 22 times.

Update, via the comments:

Rafi notes the article’s supposed candidates for our sympathy – the best that could be mustered, presumably – and adds, “They chose poorly.” Well, as a pin-up for victimhood, a basis for our collective weeping, Mr Perry is a, shall we say, suboptimal choice. But apparently, we are expected to sympathise with Mr Perry, our habitual lawbreaker, and to indulge his excuses, on account of his difficulty paying the $700 in fines that resulted from his repeated law-breaking. As if the financial consequences were inexplicable and somehow unforeseeable. Though it seems to me that not being in the best position to pay the fines that normally result from such law-breaking is a pretty good reason to avoid said law-breaking – specifically, repeatedly running red lights and thereby endangering other people’s lives.

At which point, it’s perhaps worth noting that many of the, as it were, racially insensitive cameras are located near schools.

Goldfish are capable of navigating on land, Israeli researchers have found, after training fish to drive. The team at Ben-Gurion University developed an FOV – a fish-operated vehicle. The robotic car is fitted with lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to collect data on the vehicle's ground location and the fish's whereabouts inside a mounted water tank. A computer, camera, electric motors, and omni-wheels give the fish control of the vehicle.

Hey, I’m just reading what it says here. And yes, there’s video. 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.